Larry writes:

> Interesting!!!
>
>  Now if you can attach a video clip of the lectures!

People say that, but they don't mean it.

The costs of producing televised lectures are quite high, and yet the
animated aspects of television generally add little or nothing to the quality of
presentation. Raw video is generally quite hard to watch, and if you want to
produce something more professional, you will need to edit the raw feeds in
post-production. To do that, you would have needed at least two cameras present
during the original filming, and that multicamera operation implies at least a
board operator and a floor director.

Five years ago, MIT estimated that it costs more than a thousand dollars per
sq. foot to equip a classroom for televised lectures. That cost includes the
construction of a a properly lit stage and a soundproof room at the rear of the
classroom. Some universities have spent the money to do this, the University
of Washington, Seattle among them. Their lectures are broadcast on UWTV on the
DISH satellite network.

Many of their programs are rebroadcast on-demand over the internet. The
presentations in QCShow are of a higher image resolution than the original
satellite broadcasts, and are of course enormously better than the internet
rebroadcasts. This difference is readily apparent, as you'll see, if you watch an
otherwise very interesting UWTV rebroadcast of a talk on Google's Linux cluster:

     http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.asp?rid=1680

There is a physics to the transmission of information through a pipe.
Animation of any sort consumes the vast majority of the bandwidth attendant to any
transmission. You simply have to push a lot of bits down a pipe in a short
period of time to get anything to move. The few interspersed shots you see in the
UWTV presentation of the speaker or the audience is the entirety of the reason
for UWTV having to broadcast their material at 5 to 10 times the bandwidth of
a QCShow lecture and yet still not be able to provide readable slides. Yet in
almost all circumstances, the shots of the audience or of the speaker have
little or no informational value.

Although you don't see them in the UWTV lecture, I can guarantee you that
there were at least four people working in support of recording that lecture, and
it would not surprise me if six or seven individuals were actually involved,
beyond the speaker himself.

In great contrast, we designed QCShow so that a single lecturer could sit
alone in his office, produce his PowerPoint slides, narrate them and then edit
the result into a very professional presentation, at almost no cost.

But even more than that, the image quality of the QCShow presentation is
significantly higher than that capable of being carried by full-bandwidth standard
satellite television, at 1/1000th the bandwidth, and approx. 1/1000th the
cost.

Wirt Atmar

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